Friday, November 5, 2010

"Even though this is a personal financial matter, I want to be clear about this to avoid any confusion," wrote Microsoft CEO Ballmer on the Microsoft website, to quell fears that his sale of $1.3BN worth of shares in the company was maybe a sign of an imminent departure from the hot seat that he has occupied for the past ten years.

He added:

"I am excited about our new products and the potential for our technology to change people's lives, and I remain fully committed to Microsoft and its success."

For those with a good memory, they may recognize that this same exact wording is what Ballmer's advisers have also used in the past. Such as in May 2003, when he also sold some of his holdings of Microsoft stock "to gain some diversification of his financial assets."

Wednesday, September 29, 2010

Speaking today in Tokyo at The New Context Conference 2010, the founder of Twitter, Biz Stone (pictured), put onto the record two sentences that will stand the test of time in the era of social computing:

"Twitter isn't a triumph of technology it's a triumph of humanity. A more connected world leads to a more empathic world."

Interestingly, Stone makes this observation in the self-same week that saw the sale of TechCrunch, Inc. to New York-based AOL - triggering a spate of commentaries along the lines of This Is the Death of Independent Blogging.

Is this an inflexion point? Hell, yes. And a big one. This week is also the week in which, as Guy Kawasaki reminds us, that Twitter's traffic overtook that of MySpace.

So what is going on? Why is independent blogging being characterized as dying at the very moment that tweeting is becoming as natural a part of the interconnected world as breathing?

The key, I believe, is in that word "ïnterconnected" - because blogging, for all its merits, has always suffered from that one huge shortcoming, namely that (notwithstanding the excellent innovations like RSS, Trackbacks, the Technorati real-time APIs and even Google's Blog Search) it truly isn't very interactive. I blog, you blog, he/she/it blogs. We hyperlink to each other, but that is about it. Blog feedback threads are frustratingly isolated silos. In fact, to be blunt, blogging is about as innovative a use of the Web as propping open your office door with a Xitami web server.

Tweeting, in contrast, is quite another pair of shoes. Twitter is a true co-technology. And only co-technologies will truly flourish, in the second decade of the 21st century.

Biz Stone is right: "A more connected world leads to a more empathic world." That is after all one of the pillars of co-intelligence, of the belief that none of us is as smart as all of us.

It is going to be the most interesting decade ever. You heard it here first!Disclosure: I have never been a huge proponent of blogging, as made transparent by this 2007 article.

Sunday, September 12, 2010

"Larry Ellison is borderline bat-shit crazy on a good day," the analyst Rob Enderle is quoted as saying in a piece last week by Sam Gustin - a senior writer at DailyFinance, an AOL Finance & Money site.

Enderle was prompted to utter this remark by speculation that perhaps the Oracle CEO is about to embark upon the acquisition of his life: of HP.

"I think his bet is that he can damage HP enough that it drops in value and he can wander in with an offer," Enderle is quoted as having added.

So is it possible that Ellison the Conqueror, CEO of Oracle Corporation since he founded the company in 1977, truly has the $90BN HP in the crosshairs of his acquisition rifle-sight? Can a $120BN company somehow buy and absorb a $90BN one?

Well certainly he now has on board the exact right man to tackle the integration of such a purchase: none other than HP's own former CEO, Mark Hurd. And, as Gustin expresses it:

'Ellison is a man with ambitions as big as his MIG-29 fighter jet is fast, and he's got a history of stating that the info-tech industry will further consolidate in the same way the auto industry consolidated into the Big Three in the U.S.'

Enderle was quick to highlight a revenge-is-sweet angle to, to the possible scenario.

"[W]hat could be sweeter revenge for Hurd than winding up running HP again - as a part of Oracle?"

Credit for first raising the possibility of an Oracle-HP bid goes not to Enderle or Gustin, btw, but to former FT journalist Tom Forenski, who was already writing speculatively about such a scenario back in mid-August - that's to say, before Mark Hurd had even been made Co-President of Oracle.

With cloud computing now driving a sea-change in how enterprise IT datacenters are put together, one thing is certain: more consolidation is right around the corner.

Only time will tell if an Oracle bid for HP will be next. This one, as they say, will run and run.

Thursday, August 19, 2010

Ever since I first published here my tentative list of Top Players in the Cloud Computing Ecosystem - now expanded to a list of 250 and growing daily thanks to community feedback via my Twitter account (@jg21) and a very kind mention by ReadWriteWeb - there have been suggestions that another prism through which to view cloud computing might be that of people rather than companies.

Now Michael Sheehan has encouraged me to Just Do It, so let me get started...as per the previous Top Cloud Players list, this list will a work-in-progress and is totally porous, so don't hesitate to ping or tweet me if there are folks I have missed. In particular if you are a journalist whose "beat" is Cloud Computing, please let's be hearing from you, and we can maybe widen this list from Cloud Bloggers to Cloud Commentators.

For now though let's get started. In alphabetical order - to avoid invidious arguments about "pecking order" - here goes:

EDITORIAL NOTE:As I say, all suggestions for additions are welcome. Based on previous experience, this list will no doubt grow, and probably very fast! Thanks in advance for your suggestion to http://twitter.com/jg21

Thursday, July 1, 2010

There was a mind-boggling article in the New York Times recently opining that the only way for the Washington Post Company to sell Newsweek will probably be to pay someone to take it:This surely is an inflexion point in the life of all of us who have lived - and loved - publishing for decades. It's right up there with the day that Encyclopedia Britannica realized that its Beyond Paper future lay not in CD-ROM editions but online. Newsweek, and perhaps any print weekly, is simply no longer financially viable...not as a physical magazine, anyhow.

This is a classic example of The Law of Unintended Consequences. If Tim Berners Lee had thought for a moment, back in 1990, that his invention at CERN of http + HTML + server + browser was going 20 years later to eliminate Newsweek from newsstands worldwide, he might have gone back to studying physics instead of ushering in the World Wide Web.

But what's done is done, and what interests me in this Times piece by David Carr is not so much the End-of-Newsweek story as the meta message of the article which is the contention that we now live in an age where the periodicity of publications has become a potential showstopper:

'But in the current digital news ecosystem, having “week” in your title is anachronistic in the extreme [my emphasis], what an investor would call negative equity.

And in a publishing landscape filled with the lame and infirm, weeklies are the most profoundly challenged. A weekly schedule, with its tight turnarounds and frenzied production, is costly as a matter of course. Monthlies can still do step-backs for readers who don’t expect to see what happened five minutes ago, and daily newspapers have co-opted the newsweekly formula to build in real-time analysis.'

I have to say, I am not at all certain that I buy that argument: "having 'week' in your title is anachronistic in the extreme," I mean. It sounds profound, but I think it's a crock. I created a feature for a weekly back in 1982, so very nearly thirty years ago, that to this day, were I to throw it up online, would probably be read by 100,000 people a week: it was called, simply, "The Week in Words."

Far from being a liability - not as long as a month, seven times longer than a day - the concept of a week remains in my view an almost perfect container: for thoughts as for deeds. Who does not view their life through the prism of the week? Who does not turn over a new page in their mind every Monday morning?

The comments David Carr makes about the math are interesting but they are hardly shocking. With a $40M subscription liability, he writes that any new owner would therefore be obligated to printNewsweek for the next 18 months at least - which makes no allowance at all for the possibility of "converting" subscribers in some way to another product or service..surely a manageable process given the known predilections of those individuals (thoughtful, probably high-income, influencers); why would they not be happy to be converted to a premium insight service, run as an online-only offering?,The other number Carr zeros in on is the reduction in the rate base from 2.5M to 1.6M. But no Web-based offering ever cuts back its rate base...managed correctly, anyway, a premium insight service will only ever grow its number of members...until it reaches a certain size anyway - which for commentary and analysis of this sort is surely greater than any member of the Graham family is able to comprehend.

Thursday, June 10, 2010

Investigative writer Stacey Higginbotham, who is never happier than when immersed in SEC filings, tech specs or poking through a data center, and who has spent the last ten years covering technology and finance for publications such as The Deal, the Austin Business Journal, The Bond Buyer and Business Week, speculated yesterday afternoon on the GigaOm site that VMware might be contemplating its next Cloud acquisition - to go with Zimbra and SpringSource.

In its sights, says Higginbotham, is EngineYard. Is VMware going to add Ruby on Rails to its Java mix? Only time will tell...

Adaptivity - Adaptivity "provides integrated solutions that automate IT Delivery optimization across enterprise computing environments." Those behind the company built the largest private cloud while at Wachovia and are today building clouds with Unisys. Adaptivity sees the Cloud Computing opportunity from a much broader perspective. "IaaS type resources managed externally from the enterprise do provide value; however, the larger opportunity is enabling enterprises to change how they deliver and consume IT resources," says CEO Tony Bishop in a Q&A with Cloud Computing Journal.

Abiquo - Newly re-launched with the help of $5.1M in VC money, Abiquo is now headquartered in Redwood City, CA, and has a new CEO, Pete Malcolm. the company's flagship Cloud management product, Abiquo 1.5, is "the first product to allow IT managers to automatically convert virtual machine images built for one hypervisor technology to any other supported hypervisor." One example: Abiquo 1.5 can convert from VMware to Microsoft Hyper-V, through a single drag-and-drop operation.

Sunday, May 9, 2010

10Gen - Co-founded by Dwight Merriman, who also co-founded DoubleClick and served as its CTO for ten years, 10Gen is a commercial entity offering "innovative platform technology" around the Mongo database - an open source document-oriented database "which makes data storage for web (and other) applications fast and easy."

3Tera - Offering what it calls "Cloud Computing Without Compromise," 3Tera enables the provision and deployment of "scalable clustered applications in minutes from anywhere in the world." The company was recently acquired by CA.

3PAR - Recently announced its "Cloud-Agile" program, a new partnership initiative "to promote the adoption of cloud computing and cloud-based services offered by leading providers with infrastructures powered by 3PAR Utility Storage."

3Leaf Systems -Describes itself as a provider of "next-generation server solutions to enable cloud computing." Specifically, 3Leaf offers to help companies "achieve a terabyte of DRAM at dramatically low cost" based on low-cost commodity servers by providing virtualization of CPU and memory for an entire server farm.

In the run-up to the next Cloud Expo, 7th Cloud Expo (November 1–4, 2010) being held at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Silicon Valley, it's time to give my earlier list a complete overhaul.

Here, accordingly, is an expanded list of the most active players in the Cloud Ecosystem.

I have increased it from the 'mere' 150 I identified back in January of this year, to 250, testimony – as if any were needed! – to the fierce and continuing growth of the "Elastic IT" paradigm throughout the world of enterprise computing.

Editorial note: The words in quotation marks used to describe the various services and solutions in this round-up are in every case taken from the Web sites of the companies themselves. Omissions to this Top 250 list should be sent to me via Twitter (twitter.com/jg21) and I will endeavor to include them in any future revision of this newly expanded round-up.

3Leaf Systems - Describes itself as a provider of "next-generation server solutions to enable cloud computing." Specifically, 3Leaf offers to help companies "achieve a terabyte of DRAM at dramatically low cost" based on low-cost commodity servers by providing virtualization of CPU and memory for an entire server farm. 3PAR- Recently announced its "Cloud-Agile" program, a new partnership initiative "to promote the adoption of cloud computing and cloud-based services offered by leading providers with infrastructures powered by 3PAR Utility Storage."

3Tera - Offering what it calls "Cloud Computing Without Compromise," 3Tera enables the provision and deployment of "scalable clustered applications in minutes from anywhere in the world." The company was recently acquired by CA.

10Gen - Co-founded by Dwight Merriman, who also co-founded DoubleClick and served as its CTO for ten years, 10gen is a commercial entity offering "innovative platform technology" around the Mongo database - an open source document-oriented database "which makes data storage for web (and other) applications fast and easy."

Abiquo - Newly re-launched with the help of $5.1M in VC money, Abiquo is now headquartered in Redwood City, CA, and has a new CEO, Pete Malcolm. the company's flagship Cloud management product, Abiquo 1.5, is "the first product to allow IT managers to automatically convert virtual machine images built for one hypervisor technology to any other supported hypervisor." One example: Abiquo 1.5 can convert from VMware to Microsoft Hyper-V, through a single drag-and-drop operation.

Adaptive Computing - Manager of some of the world’s largest computing installations, privately held Adaptive Computing has an offering, the Moab suite, that "delivers infrastructure intelligence that enables data center and private and public cloud environments to adapt to changing business needs in real time." Moab, which Adaptive defines as "unified intelligent automation technology," seeks to empower organizations "to move beyond consolidated hardware and software infrastructures to the real promise of private clouds" - a promise which it defines as "the automated and intelligent delivery of infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) based on application workloads."

Adaptivity - Adaptivity "provides integrated solutions that automate IT Delivery optimization across enterprise computing environments." Those behind the company built the largest private cloud while at Wachovia and are today building clouds with Unisys. Adaptivity sees the Cloud Computing opportunity from a much broader perspective. "IaaS type resources managed externally from the enterprise do provide value; however, the larger opportunity is enabling enterprises to change how they deliver and consume IT resources," says CEO Tony Bishop in a Q&A with Cloud Computing Journal.

Agathon Group - A dedicated grid environment that allows charitable and non-profit campaigns to scale on demand.

Akamai - Akamai claims to have been optimizing the cloud for over ten years, building a global computing platform "that helps make cloud computing a reality." Services for cloud optimization are now a vital part of the company's total offering, and go well beyond Content Delivery Network (CDN) cache-based technologies - marking Akamai's transition from CDN to full-fledged Cloud Computing player.

Amazon EC2 - When Amazon introduced its virtual computing environment, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud or EC2, "to enable you to increase or decrease capacity within minutes, not hours or days," it single-handedly brought Cloud Computing to the very forefront of public awareness by using Web services to provide what it called "resizeable compute capacity in the cloud." EC2 runs within Amazon's proven network infrastructure and datacenters and allows customers to pay only for what they use. See also S3.

Amplidata - The Amplidata offering - a "fully online and ultimately scalable storage system" - is an answer to industry trends like the growing need for disk based storage, the success of SSD, RAID not keeping up with availability and efficiency requirements. Termed “unbreakable storage” by the company, it has plenty of features for cloud-like deployments: scalability, thin provisioning, snapshots and cloning.

Appirio - Offers services and products to accelerate the adoption of on-demand solutions, and recently secured $5.6 million of financing in a Series B round led by Sequoia Capital.

Appistry - As a company that positions itself boldly "At the convergence of Grid Computing, Virtualization and SOA" Appistry offers a grid-based application platform that makes it very easy to scale-out CPU- and data-intensive applications across a virtualized grid of commodity servers. Unlike traditional grid products based on legacy scheduler technology, the company's robust "fabric" architecture has no single point of failure and "is well suited for extreme transaction processing (XTP), software-as-a-service (SaaS), cloud computing, and other data- and CPU-intensive applications."

Apprenda - The true power of software-based computing was realized when software developers could stop focusing on interfacing directly with hardware, and instead focus on the ingenuity of their software, say the founders of Apprenda - the company behind SaaSGrid, an operating system for building and deploying Software as a Service applications, and a platform for conducting Software as a Service business.

AppZero - Pioneer of virtual application appliances (VAA) which decouple an application from the operating system (OS) and its underlying infrastructure." The resultant virtual application appliance contains an application with its dependencies, but with zero operating system (zeOS) component," says the company. The aim of VAAs is to enable enterprises to provision server based applications to any machine in the data center in a matter of seconds or move an application from the data center to the cloud (D2C).

Arjuna - Describing its Agility offering as an "on-ramp to the Cloud [that] allows the IT department to begin to experiment with cloud computing in a gradual, incremental way, without any need for disruption to existing service," Arjuna is positioned to help IT towards a world in which internal IT infrastructure can over time be increasingly subsumed into the cloud.

Asankya - Asankya describes itsefl as "the cloud acceleration company" and specializes in the high speed delivery of Internet-based applications. Asankya provides an Application Delivery Network (ADN) service for leading SaaS companies, cloud storage providers, internal enterprise cloud users and key government entities.

AT&T - AT&T broke into the cloud business in August 2008 with the global launch of what it calls AT&T Synaptic Hosting - described as "a next-generation utility computing service with managed networking, security and storage for businesses."

Azure - see Microsoft

BlueLock - Claiming to have "some of the best virtualization and cloud talent around," BlueLock - a provider of cloud hosting and managed IT services - notes that it has helped companies of all sizes find the best way to leverage industry-leading cloud hosting solutions. "It doesn’t matter if you’re a Software as a Service (SaaS) company, a Fortune 500 company or a start-up," says the Company on its website.

Bluewolf - A leading provider of on-demand software deployment services, Bluewolf offers remote database management and recently announced its "Arcade" cloud storage offering that allows users to economically store a virtually unlimited number of files of all sizes through the Salesforce interface.

Boomi - Creator of AtomSphere, which the company calls "the industry’s first integration platform-as-a-service." It is a pure SaaS integration platform that does not require software or appliances.Box-Net

Booz Allen Hamilton - Management consultancies are also now part of the Cloud ecosystem by dint of their wide range of offerings aimed at all aspects of the phenomenon, and Booz Allen Hamilton (BAH) in particular has positioned itself in the forefront the federal government's Cloud Computing initiative. According to its special Cloud Computing website. "Booz Allen is prepared to support all elements of government defense and civilian missions and migration efforts to “the cloud.” ... Booz Allen is also developing new economic analysis—addressing all cost categories for a variety of potential cloud uses—to help agencies “make the case” for migrating to the cloud."

CA Technologies - Bought the key assets - software assets and engineering team - of Cloud Computing player Cassatt in June 2009. Followed by 3Tera in February 2010. There's a great blog here that gives an insight into what's cooking, written by CA Technologies though leaders - or "Storm Chasers" as they're apparently referred to internally. And the roadmap for the overall CA Technologies approach to Cloud computing is here.Callidus On-Demand SPM - see Callidus SoftwareCallidus Software - This leading provider of Sales Performance Management (SPM) solutions has launched Callidus On-Demand SPM, "a scalable, secure, subscriber-based model that does not require additional IT resources."

Canonical - One of the main sponsors and supporters of Ubuntu - the first Linux distribution to launch a hybrid cloud strategy offering its users integrated open source technology to easily build private clouds combined with a lean operating system designed for use on Amazon's EC2.

Cassatt - [UPDATE: Cassatt is no more. Its key assets were sold to CA in June 2009.] As early as 2004 Cassatt, led by visionary CEO Bill Coleman (the 'B' in BEA Systems), was outlining a roadmap to deliver on the promise of automating IT operations for on-demand computing. Its angle, Cloud Computing-wise: a focus not on public or external clouds but on 'Internal Clouds' since external cloud computing but may be ruled out due to lack of SLA control, security, and compliance, whereas Cassatt contends there is an alternative: an internal Utility Computing architecture yielding the same simplicity and economies-of-scale as an external PaaS cloud.

Cisco - By virtue of its recent acquisitions, most significantly WebEx and PostPath, Cisco is firmly on its way to joining the Cloud Crowd. “We are believers in the cloud-based delivery model for certain types of services in particular inter-company collaboration services, and that is why we got WebEx and now PostPath,” Charles Carmel, Cisco's vice president of corporate development, told Red Herring in August 2008.

Cloud9 Analytics - Offers what is calls "the industry's first truly on-demand analytics platform" - the brainchild of CTO Scott Weiner, who views the Cloud as the ultimate data warehouse in the sky.

Cloudant - A Y-Combinator company whose founders have more than 10 years of experience managing multi-petabyte datasets, Cloudant’s first product is a CouchDB-as-a-Service (CDBaaS?), or what the company calls "Hosted Couch."

CloudBerry Lab - Established in 2008 by a group of experienced IT professionals with the mission "to help organizations in adopting Cloud computing technologies by closing the gap between Cloud vendors propositions and consumer needs through development of innovative low-cost solutions" - flagship product: CloudBerry Explorer for Amazon S3.

Cloudera - Recently co-founded by former Googler Christophe Bisciglia and others, Cloudera help its customers install, configure and run Hadoop for large-scale data processing and analysis.

Cloudscale - Cloudscale's unique patent-pending cloud dataflow technology "automatically provides the parallelism and scalability required to handle anything from one-off personal analytics agents up to the most demanding live analytics applications required by the world's leading organizations in business, web, science and government."

CloudSmart - see CSS Corp

CloudShare - Using sophisticated virtualization technology to simulate an entire IT environment, CloudShare "enables technology vendors and enterprises to conduct evaluations, proofs-of-concept, demos, training and certification without shipping machines or traveling to customers, using an on-demand cloud-based service."

Cloudswitch - Fast-growing cloud computing company backed by Matrix Partners, Atlas Venture and Commonwealth Capital Ventures, currently in stealth mode. CloudSwitch is developing what it describes as "an innovative software appliance that delivers the power of cloud computing seamlessly and securely so enterprises can dramatically reduce cost and improve responsiveness to the business."Cloudworks - The goal of Cloudworks is to allow small and mid-market companies to outsource all of their computers, software, and data. Completely web-based, it works like Salesforce or Hotmail - a company's employees can log in through a web browser to access their desktop, server, software, files, email...everything.

CohesiveFT - As the provider of what it calls 'Elastic Server On-Demand' - aimed at "enabling customers to build and manage applications for virtualized infrastructure and cloud computing,"CohesiveFT's Elastic Server Platform allows users to assemble and deploy servers to Cloud Computing Platforms "in minutes." The company likes to think of Elastic Server as a Great Enabler, "allowing you to package your apps for prime time, and do it all by yourself."

Cordys - The Process Factory by Cordys is a simple, reliable and secure solution for anyone to create MashApps business processes from the Cloud - simply by mixing and matching standard business applications such as Google apps and commercially available services. MashApps can be made in minutes, without any coding. This tool has the capability to do for cloud application development environments what Visual Basic did for Windows - fast, easy, and efficient to develop and deploy bespoke applications.

CSS Corp - Through CSS Labs, CSS Corp - headquartered in San Jose, CA - develops cloud computing solutions "that help its customers meet real-world business challenges." In November 2009 it launched Go Cloud, an entire suite of platforms and services based on cloud computing. In April 2010 this was expanded into a CSS suite of Cloud management tools including CSS CloudSmart (an ANT-based automated deployment tool to automate complex enterprise application deployment process on the cloud.) In June 2010 it acquire Aliquo Solutions "to help [its] customers manage their technical debt as well as explore new technologies such as cloud computing."Cumulux - Cumulux is a Cloud solution provider offering products and services that "help enterprises harness the benefits of the cloud." Cumulux' flagship product, Hybrid Axis "helps enterprises extend their current investments to the cloud by integrating traditional and cloud based applications." Cumulux also offers services like cloud assessments, "rapid prototyping to help enterprises take the right steps towards cloud adoption."

Dataline - Provides cloud computing advice and expertise to the larger FSIs (i.e. Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, etc) and bundles commercial cloud computing offerings in a way that meets Federal customer requirements. Although not a product vendor, the role this company fills as a mid-level Federal System Integrator is crucial to the adoption of these technologies by the public sector.

Elastra - Styling itself as a provider of "Elastic Computing," Elastra offers to "design, deploy & manage database and application infrastructure in the Cloud in minutes - all with the click of a button." Dedicated to providing companies building applications with a way to radically innovate the way they develop their products and deliver them on IT infrastructure, Elastra's aim is to help a company "unlock the value of cloud computing by using virtualized hardware environments with cloud-provisioned database and infrastructure software that are easily configurable and do not require scripting, respond elastically to changing load and are delivered in the cloud with meter-based pricing."

EMC - When creating a Cloud Computing division within the company in February 2008, EMC CEO Joe Tuccidelared that 85 percent of data will be managed in what he called "big, safe information repositories in the Internet ’sky,’ so to speak. We’re [talking] cloud computing..."

Engine Yard - As a company dedicated to "furthering innovation in Ruby, Rails and cloud computing," Engine Yard offers Rails-focused "24/7 operations support on top of great infrastructure" to companies in search of a smooth path from 100 users to 100,000 users. In July 2008 the company closed $15 million of Series B financing led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA), which included participation from Amazon.com. It has two PaaS products, xCloud and AppCloud, both based exclusively on open source technology.

ENKI - The company aim is "to allow you to focus on delivering your application to your customers while we handle the operations side: providing computing as a reliable service."

Enomaly - Enomaly offers the "Enomaly Elastic Computing Platform" or "Enomaly ECP" - which it describes as being "the answer for service providers that want to leverage the power, flexibility, and compelling economics of cloud computing." The aim of ECP is to empower carriers, xSPs and enterprise end-user organizations to deliver infrastructure-on-demand services to their customers and stakeholders.

enStratus - Arguably the #2 cloud management player next to RightScale, enStratus seeks to to deliver security and reliability for what it terms "confidence in the cloud." Describing itself as "the leading cloud management platform for enterprise applications," the company is based in Minneapolis, Minnesota and claims to enable "up to six 9’s availability for Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, ReliaCloud and Windows Azure" through a patent-pending security architecture and an intelligent auto recovery engine.

F5 Networks - Any company laying claim to be an IT provider of 41 of the Fortune 50 companies and 15 of the top 15 commercial banks merits attention from a Cloud computing perspective. F5 describes itself as "the only vendor that provides an open architectural framework, offering IT organizations new ways to deliver services that generate true business value." For F5 help on controlling the Cloud, look here.

Flexiant - UK-based Flexiant offers what it calls "pay-as-you-go utility computing solutions, both as a public platform (FlexiScale) and as a licensed product for data center owners (Extility). The company describes its FlexiScale 2.0 as "a complete rebuild of Europe’s first cloud platform using Flexiant’s revolutionary Extility technology."

FlexiScale - The brainchild of CEO Tony Lucas, FlexiScale is a flexible, scalable, automated hosting platform ("Cloud Computing On-Demand"). Lays claim on its site to being "Europe’s first cloud platform," and FlexiScale 2.0, a public cloud launched in June 2010, shows it is still developing actively.

Fortress ITXG.ho.stGigaSpaces - Founded in 2000, with offices in the US, Europe and Asia, GigaSpaces allows businesses and developers "to predictably scale on-line systems under any peak demand, guarantee real-time performance under any data processing load and seamlessly leverage the economies of scale offered by virtual computing environments such as clouds and grids."

Go Cloud - see CSS Corp

GoGrid/ServPath - Launched in 2006 as ServePath’s latest growth opportunity, GoGrid, claims the company, "delivers true 'Control in the Cloud' by combining many of the familiar features of dedicated server or managed hosting with the flexibility and scalability of cloud server hosting." In other words, with GoGrid customers can grow production servers in real time to meet demand without affecting their uptime. Provisioning and de-provisioning of servers is all done via the Internet.

Google - Without a doubt 'the elephant in the cloud' - According to this well-researched article, Google filed as long ago as February 2006 a provisional patent application with 91 different numbered claims that arguably makes it clear that Google has a multi-year lead in cloud computing.

gOS - Founded in early 2007, Good OS is an operating system software company based in Silicon Valley, California, USA and Taipei, Taiwan. Its mission is: "to enable cloud computing through software."

Greenqloud - Based in Iceland, Greenqloud's founders call it "the world's first truly green public compute cloud." It uses only clean and renewable geothermal and hydro energy sources to power its infrastructure. Being in Iceland there is obviously an abundance of geothermal energy and free cooling but Iceland is also a network hub with redundant low latency multi-terabit fiber connections to N-America and Europe making it much cheaper to serve both markets at once.

Grid Dynamics - Technology consultancy that helps customers "architect, design and deliver business systems that handle peak loads, scale on demand and always stay up - using the latest advances in grid and cloud computing."

Hadoop - See Apache Hadoop

Heroku - According to the San Francisco-based company's founders, "Heroku means never thinking about hosting or servers again." In May 2008 they raised a $3M round of funding for their online deployment system for Ruby on Rails apps. In May 2010 that was followed by a $10M Series B round. A company that testifies to the success of Ruby as a language for building cloud apps, Heroku is a Y! Combinator start-up.

Hosting.comHP - As long ago as 2009, HP announced its "HP Cloud Assure" offering, a SaaS offering designed "to help businesses safely and effectively adopt cloud-based services." Then in January 2010 Microsoft and HP announced a joint $250M investment over the next three years to create an optimized platform for integrating Microsoft software and HP hardware - all part of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's vision of the cloud as nothing more really than "a modern architecture for how you build and deploy applications.” Hubspan - Seattle-based Hubspan, the company behind the industry’s "first secure and reliable single-instance, multi-tenant integration platform delivered as a managed service," has gained widespread traction worldwide with its flagship WebSpan cloud-based solution, a Software-as-a-Service integration platform leverages the SaaS model "to reduce the cost and complexity of integrating processes within and between enterprises."Hyperic - Founded in 2004, Hyperic provides complete, easy-to-use monitoring and management software for all types of web applications, including hosting it in the cloudvia its CloudStatus dashboard currently in beta.

HyperOffice - A recognized leader in the white-hot online communication and collaboration solutions industry for small to mid sized businesses (SMBs), HyperOffice aims "to empower growing organizations with technology traditionally available only to large enterprises, and help them achieve business growth, competitive advantage and success." The company was one of the first to offer software-as-a-service - and HyperOffice now has more than 300,000 users worldwide.

IBM - IBM approaches cloud computing "from the inside out" as it describes it. This means that Big Blue's focus is on building the most secure, efficient and resilient infrastructure for today’s organizations, and building the cloud experience as part of that infrastructure. With more than a dozen Blue Cloud Computing Centers worldwide, IBM provides cloud services, ready for use, designed to assist organizations in proving a cloud experience for their constituents. In addition, IBM is the premier company to help build an organization’s private cloud, or leverage any of the many IT services that are today provided by IBM through cloud computing, like Capacity on Demand, or the IBM Information Protection Services.

iCloud- Swedish-based iCloud offers what it calls a "consumer Cloud computer." Describing it as "an affordable and easy to use cloud-based home server with open APIs," the company behind it, Xcerion, provides its users with a full remote management desktop to handle the online computer and manage uploaded files. Xcerion describes iCloud as a "Cloud OS" based on 22 pending patents: in short, a computer online.

Intalio- Led by the charismatic Ismael Ghalimi (Co-Founder & CEO), Intalio has since 1999 kept itself at the Enterprise IT forefont, and now provides what it calls "an integrated portfolio of applications for cloud computing." The Intalio|Cloud offering is available through three editions, and the company now calls itself "The Private Cloud Company".

Intel- Intel believes in Open Cloud Standards and one commentator believes there is a strong correlation between how fast cloud computing can proliferate and how well Intel plays its role to lead the open cloud solutions at IaaS and PaaS layers.Interoute - Europe’s largest and most advanced fibre optic network, the Interoute platform operates as effectively Europe’s largest privately owned cloud.

Intuit - In April 2008 Intuit launched Intuit Cloud, a cloud computing platform based on Adobe Flex with QuickBase.

Iomart - One of the UK's largest "managed hosting and cloud computing services" companies, iomart Group plc - with its "Step Up to the Cloud" slogan - aims to be the UK market leader.

jClouds - An open source framework, the jClouds API aims to help Java developers get started in the cloud and reuse their Java development skills within Cloud computing. The API allows developers "freedom to use portable abstractions or cloud-specific features." It supports many clouds including Amazon, VMware, Azure, and Rackspace.

Joyent - The Joyent platform, which "enables teams to effectively communicate and collaborate with email, calendaring, contacts, file sharing, and other shared applications," already serves billions of Web pages every month and helped LinkedIn scale to 1 billion page views per month. Self-described as an "On-Demand Computing" provider, Joyent has developed, built and scaled some of the earliest Ruby on Rails applications – and as a result, developed a world-class infrastructure, a methodology around how to deploy and scale (both up and down) Rails applications.

JumpBox - Describes itself as a supplier of "Instant Infrastructure." Specifically, it is a ready-to-deploy virtual computer that contains a pre-configured instance of an application.

Juniper Networks -

Kaavo - provides a platform for managing distributed applications in the clouds. Kaavo’s core product, Infrastructure and Middleware on Demand (IMOD), "makes it easier for individuals and businesses to implement on-demand infrastructure and middleware and run secure and scalable web services and applications." The Kaavo philosophy is that taking a top down application-centric approach of managing infrastructure and middleware makes it easy to fully automate application lifecycle management.Kadient -

Keynote Systems - Long a player in the SaaS space, in 2009 Keynote opened its cloud infrastructure and offered any Web team free access to KITE (Keynote Internet Testing Environment), its product for testing and analyzing the performance of Web applications across the Internet cloud. With a Web application’s performance depending on a variety of clouds’ infrastructures, ad servers and other third party content, potential pitfalls grow exponentially and Keynote contends understandably that "it’s more important than ever for Internet companies to test and measure applications to ensure a superior end user experience." With KITE, companies have free access to Keynote’s cloud infrastructure and a tool to test and monitor their applications from cities all over the world.

LongJump - The Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solution that LongJump offers is described by the company as "an on-demand platform for creating and delivering business applications to manage data, streamline collaborative processes and provide actionable analysis." The company claims that the LongJump platform has "extensive features around security access, data analysis and visualization, and process automation – all on the web."

Meeza - Qatar-based, Meeza is currently the main Cloud Services Provider within Middle East North Africa region.

MindTouch - Describing itself as "an open source leader in enterprise Collaborative Networks and powers next generation intranets, extranets and knowledge bases," MindTouch offers its MindTouch Cloud for collaboration "with the ease of a wiki but with the capabilities of a true enterprise platform."

MorphLabs - Describing itself as "a comprehensive cloud computing enabler for enterprise and service providers," MorphLabs was established in 2006 "to make elastic computing possible for Enterprise Data Centers and Application Developers." The company currently has presence in North America and Asian markets (its website is available in both English and Japanese versions), and its main offering is the mCloud series - which "virtualizes commodity hardware while simplifying system administration and application management."

NaviSite - At 5th Cloud Expo in New York NaviSite launched its enterprise cloud based services, offered with guaranteed infrastructure and application SLAs, usage-based pricing, and delivered on its enterprise-class, highly available, scalable and secure application-focused NaviCloud platform.

newScale - Adamant that self-service is essential for any public or private cloud,newScale provides a self-service IT storefront for the enterprise, "driving standards and service request automation – from the desktop to the data center, for physical, virtual, and cloud environments." As noted by newScale CTO and founder, Rodrigo Fernando Flores, "Amazon has redefined the expectations and pricing for data center services. Make no mistake, they are competition for enterprise IT. Internal IT departments must get ahead of this challenge, by defining their own Service Catalog, introducing self-service, and deploying their own on-premise cloud." In line with this viewpoint, newScale's own Service Catalog offers a menu of standardized service options, self-service ordering, and billing for cloud resources – thereby "enabling the operating model for a private, internal, or hybrid cloud."

Nimbus - Nimbus is an open source toolkit "that allows you to turn your cluster into an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud." It predates Amazon EC2 though that wire protocol is now supported - in fact as of the latest release in July 2010 there are three interfaces: Amazon EC2 WSDLs, Amazon EC2 Query API and Grid community WSRF. The project defines its mission as being "to evolve the infrastructure with emphasis on the needs of science" - 'Cloud Computing for Science' is its motto - but many non-scientific use cases are supported as well.

Nimbula - Headquartered in Menlo Park, California with a development team in South Africa, Nimbula calims to deliver "a new class of cloud infrastructure and services system that...combines the flexibility, scalability and operational efficiencies of the public cloud with the control, security and trust of today’s most advanced data centers." One of the interesting aspects of this company is that it was founded by the team that developed Amazon EC2 [see entry] - the mother and father of all public cloud services.Ning

Nirvanix - San Diego based Nirvanix provides an enterprise cloud offering, the Nirvanix Storage Delivery Network (SDN) - a "fully-managed, secure cloud storage service developed for today's enterprises." Nirvanix SDN offers companies with more than 5TBs of data a highly scalable storage and delivery platform, The company has already raised more than $18 million in funding from world-class investors including Intel Capital. Customers include Fortune 50, media and entertainment and innovative Web 2.0 customers.

Novell- The recently-announced Novell Cloud Security Service "enables cloud service providers and Software-as-a-Service vendors to ensure their offerings meet the strict security and compliance standards required by global businesses."

OpenNebula - OpenNebula is a widely used open-source tool for the efficient, dynamic and scalable management of VMs within datacenters (private clouds) involving a large amount of virtual and physical servers. It supports Xen, KVM and on-demand access to Amazon EC2. The tool is being used as core component in several cloud projects, such as RESERVOIR.

OpSource - OpSource, provider of enterprise cloud and Software-as-a-Service hosting & services for Fortune 1000, SaaS and Web companies, claims to support daily "hundreds of applications, millions of users and billions of transactions." Its offerings include the OpSource Cloud and the market-leading OpSource On-Demand, aimed at empowering SaaS ISVs to bring enterprise cloud solutions to their end-users.

Oracle - The world's largest business software company believes that Private Clouds for the exclusive use of one enterprise can mitigate concerns about security, quality of service, integration, compliance, lock-in, and long term costs of public clouds by giving the enterprise greater control.

OrangeScape - Offers a Platform-as-a-Service for building business applications that run on all the major cloud platforms - Google App Engine, Microsoft Azure, IBM SmartCloud, Amazon EC2 - or your own data center.

Parallels - Founded in 1999, Parallels optimizes computing by providing virtualization and automation software to businesses and service providers across all major hardware, operating systems, and virtualization platforms. Parallels is working closely with a network of ISVs and service providers to enable them to build their cloud computing and software-as-a-service offerings, meeting the needs of end-user organizations of all size. Parallels technology is also used by large enterprises creating their own in-house clouds.

ParaScale - "Cloud storage" involves clustering tens to hundreds of servers together to act as one giant file repository with massive capacity and parallel throughput for a variety of applications. ParaScale's software "enables the enterprise or service provider to build enormous storage pools on commodity hardware at an affordable cost."

Penguin Computing - Penguin has launched an HPC cloud called Penguin on Demand (POD). Penguin is targeting researchers, scientists and engineers who need surge capacity for time-critical analyses or can't afford their own HPC cluster.

PerspecSys - Only rarely does a CEO blow me away with what his company is offering, but Terry Woloszyn of is one of those few who does. PerspecSys is leading the world in providing Cloud Data Governance Solutions. If you're unclear what the issues are that PerspecSys is solving (three clues: Privacy • Residency • Security), then watch this Cloud Expo interview, in which Woloszyn explains it beautifully and with infectious clarity.

Platform Computing - Founded in 1992, Platform is a pioneer and global leader in HPC (high-performance computing) and takes the view that there is an intersection between grid computing and cloud computing in that both cloud and grid propose an architecture that masks the complexity of managing thousands of commodity servers from their users.Postcode Anywhere - UK-based Postcode Anywhere is a good example of a company that's successfully monetizing cloud-based applications - in this case for UK and international addressing, cleansing and profiling. "We are a cloud computing company and people can benefit from all the tech stuff that enables people to run large scale businesses like the one we have built,” says co-founder Jamie Turner.

Quantivo - Claims to be "revolutionizing the Business Intelligence (BI) world by combining Cloud Computing with an innovative and patented 'Affinity Analytics' technology." Company recently won the Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal’s prestigious Emerging Technology Award in the Cloud Computing category.

Rackspace- Market-leading specialist in hosting and cloud computing services, Rackspace Hosting is "changing the way businesses worldwide buy IT." Rackspace delivers computing-as-a-service, "integrating the industry’s best technologies into a flexible service offering, making computing more reliable and affordable." Rackspace is distinguished by its award-winning "Fanatical Support," furthering the company’s mission to be one of the world’s greatest service companies. Rackspace is recognized as one of FORTUNE Magazine’s 100 Best companies to work for in the US, ranking number 43 on the list. Rackspace's portfolio of hosted IT services includes Managed Hosting, Cloud Hosting, and Email and Apps.

Red Hat- RH believes that its consistent dedication to open source and open standards will further the success of a strong cloud ecosystem. "By bringing together thousands of Red Hat-certified applications, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, JBoss Enterprise Middleware and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization we aim to deliver the next generation of computing architectures, today," says a company spokesman. Reservoir

Rhomobile - Rhomobile provides RhoHub, which is describes as "the world's first Development-as-a-Service for Mobile." RhoHub provides a cloud-based service for both smartphone app development and hosting of mobile applications.

RightNow - With its RightNow Secure Government Cloud, which meets intense levels of security certification and accreditation, RightNow has worked with more than 170 government clients who it claims are already implemented in the cloud. The company claims to be "the only vendor to launch a defense and government-ready SaaS product set that adheres to the stringent security and compliance requirements as set out by the various U.S. government regulating bodies."

RightScale - RightScale offers a fully automated cloud management platform that enables organizations "to easily deploy and manage business critical applications across multiple clouds with complete control and portability." The RightScale Cloud Management Platform is delivered as software-as-a-service (SaaS) and is available in a range of editions, froma free Developer Edition to Enterprise Editions.

ScaleUp Technologies - Offering a cloud platform based in Germany/Europe, ScaleUp claims to go "beyond the virtualization concepts of providing virtual servers and storage capacities that have been around for a couple of years now" and to be capable of "virtually provisioning almost every component of a real-world datacenter with a mouse click." It is is a spin-off of a German based Internet service provider, internet4YOU GmbH & Co. KG.

Secure Government Cloud - see RightNow

ServePath/GoGrid - Launched in 2006 as ServePath’s latest growth opportunity, GoGrid, claims the company, "delivers true 'Control in the Cloud' by combining many of the familiar features of dedicated server or managed hosting with the flexibility and scalability of cloud server hosting." In other words, with GoGrid customers can grow production servers in real time to meet demand without affecting their uptime. Provisioning and de-provisioning of servers is all done via the Internet.

SIMtone - Durham, NC based SIMtone has developed and commercialized a 'Universal Cloud Computing Platform' that allows network operators and businesses "to host, manage and quickly provision any cloud-hosted services, and ubiquitously deliver them to zero-touch terminals that can be standalone, low cost hardware appliances, or software terminals usable via browsers or on PCs, thin clients and mobile devices."

Skytap- Seattle-based Skytap's goal is "to bring the power and economics of cloud computing to all business applications, to make businesses agile and productive." Its current product offering, Skytap Cloud, enables companies to develop, test, train, migrate and demo applications in the cloud without requiring any code or architectural changes. The company claims to deliver "70% cost reduction."

SLA@SOI - SLA@SOI's vision is "to create a business-ready service-oriented infrastructure that will empower the service economy in a flexible and dependable way."

SmugMug - Founded 5 years ago, SmuMug calls itself "the ultimate in photosharing" since it offers unlimited storage and stores backup copies of each photo in multiple datacenters. With more than 315,000 paying customers already, and 288,000,000 photos, SmugMug is a QED of cloud computing.

SOASTA - No one who heard SOASTA speak at AJAXWorld in 2007 about best practices in AJAX testing will be surprised to hear that Web testing is also at the heart of its CloudTest offering, a Cloud-based testing solution "built on the cloud to enable application testing in the cloud."

Sonian - Describing itself as the first Email Archiving platform powered by cloud computing, Sonian is a hosted services company on a mission "to help millions of organizations world-wide manage their critical IT functions such as archiving, search, compliance, e-discovery and storage management." Specializes in enterprises and SMBs, and leverages Amazon Web Services, including Amazon S3 [see entry above] for storage.

Spare Backup - Interestingly, this US-based provider of automated, online backup applications for home users and small businesses has made great inroads in Europe and is working with major UK retailers like Carphone Warehouse, Comet and DSGI PLC.

SpringCM - Venture-backed SpringCM has pioneered Enterprise Content Management in the Cloud, making ECM available as "a quick-to-deploy web-based service for a low monthly fee." Cloud-based ECM, says the company, has considerable advantages when compared to the costs and complexities of implementing on-premise enterprise content management solutions and managing them in-house.

Stoneware - Stoneware's webNetwork creates a private cloud platform and the virtual web desktop to access it. The company describes this as "a desktop interface built on Ajax [that] can be accessed from any common web browser such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Chrome. From the webOS interface, users can access all of their assigned web, Windows, and hosted applications."

StorSimple - StorSimple provides what it calls a "cloud-ready storage appliance." The aim is "to enable customers to seamlessly and securely use...cloud storage services with their existing data-center applications." The company recently announced integration with Amazon, EMC, Iron Mountain, and Microsoft.

Symplified - Symplified’s vision is to secure the Cloud and SaaS applications by providing what it calls "On-Demand Identity." The company has developed SinglePoint, which it describes as "a massively scalable Internet utility that delivers access management, authentication, SSO, federation, auditing, compliance and administration capabilities for the cloud." SinglePoint’s "connect once and integrate an ecosystem" unifies multiple cloud apps like Salesforce.com, Google, ADP, WebEx, Taleo, Xactly and many others. Terremark - Offering 'Enterprise Cloud' services that "let you control a resource pool of processing, storage and networking and allow you to deploy server capacity on demand," Terremark as years of experience managing complex, mission critical infrastructures and applications for leading companies around the world.

UC4 - UC4 products, which work across physical, virtual, and cloud computing environments, bring what the company calls "Intelligent Service Automation" to more than 1,700 companies worldwide - enabling automation, in effect, both on-premise and in the cloud. The company claims to be able to "Bridge the cloud automation gap between old and new applications and automate processing across your enterprise."

Unisys -The Unisys cloud computing strategy enables clients to choose the type of data center computing services that best meet their business objectives, from self-managed, automated IT infrastructures to Unisys-managed cloud services. Using Unisys services and technologies, organizations can create a private cloud within their data centers, a public cloud through secure Unisys-managed cloud solutions, or a hybrid cloud solution combining the best of both private and Unisys-managed cloud services.

Univa UD - Univa UD is a leader and innovator in software solutions for cloud enablement. The company's software suite includes infrastructure management and service governance for cloud and HPC environments and spans all 3 cloud scenarios: public, private and hybrid. "With Univa products, companies can build private internal compute clouds, create clusters in a public cloud, or span the two by cloudbursting from an internal to external environment on demand."

Virtual Ark - Virtual Ark is committed to "delivering competitive advantage to major global customers through outsourced IT application management in the cloud." The newly launched company's aim is to be the leading global provider of Enterprise Application Managed Services in specific industries to major global customers on Cloud Computing Infrastructure.

Virtual Logistics - Specialist in what is calls cloud-based "ÏaaS Integration", the service offered by Ontario-based Virtual Logistics is a configurable any-to-any integration service that is transportable should the client want to transition to on-premise.

VMware - "A virtualization leader and pioneer, VMware has effectively delivered the technology that makes today’s clouds possible. With the pervasive presence of VMware in many accounts, enterprises are leveraging their virtualization infrastructure to build internal clouds, and leverage technology like VMotion to flex resources for DR or test and development to external clouds, as needed." Its vCloud initiative, says the company, "offers users of all sizes this robust and reliable platform, support for any application on or off site, and choice from over 100 service providers worldwide who deliver the cloud on VMware." Another usefully concise vCloud summary is at its Twitter stream: "VMware vCloud delivers a single way to run, manage, and secure your applications where you want them, when you want them."

WebSpan - see Hubspan

WorkXpress - PaaS pioneer WorkXpress released v 2.0 of its flagship customizable software platform in April 2009. "WorkXpress 2.0 is the world’s most functional PaaS (Platform as a Service)" claimed the Company in an accompanying statement.

WSO2 - Long known as an Apache-oriented firm specializing in lightweight services infrastructure, WSO2 began offering in June 2010 a private cloud building platform, Stratos.

Zetta - Provider of what it describes as "best-in-class NAS storage in the cloud." Zetta's founders are the team who commercialized the web as the leaders of Netscape.

Zimory - A spin-off of Deutsche Telekom Laboratories, Zimory "enables dynamic, on-demand movement of applications automatically between servers in one or many locations, as well as creating the world's first marketplace for computing capacity." Based in Berlin, the company develops a dynamic infrastructure solution for data centers to create a modern Adaptive Cloud Infrastructure - "improving flexibility and reducing operating costs."Zoho

Zuora - With its "Powering the Business Cloud" slogan, Zuora has planted its flag firmly atop the Cloud Billing mountain. The company describes its Z-Commerce Platform as "the first commerce platform for cloud developers."

Monday, March 29, 2010

In my last post we looked at how Cloudomania was widening its global footprint in 2010, widening its lead on Virtualization as the technology du jour.

My brief post ended:

As you can see, the rise and rise of Cloud Computing, for all that it stumbled at the end of last year, has in 2010 resumed its giddy trajectory. The next question, naturally, is: why?

Anyone who looks at the technology landscape for a living as I am privileged to do knows that the following is true: Every new technology wave is

Like all other technology waves

Like some other technology waves

Like no other technology wave

Let me show just how true this is of Cloud Computing.

Cloud Computing is Like All Other Technology WavesThe genesis of the actual term "cloud computing" is slightly fuzzy, just like the genesis of "Java" OR "SOA" OR "blogging" - somehow one difference between Internet technologies and, say, pharmaceuticals is that there's always a collectiveness about Internet innovation, even down to the naming process.

Cloud Computing is Like Some Other Technology WavesCloud Computing has achieved massive press attention just like "Web 2.0" and it has experienced rapid and mushrooming adoption just like Java.

Cloud Computing is Like No Other Technology WaveThis is where is starts to get really interesting. Since the inception of the Internet in 1973 (or ARPANET as it was then still called), there has never been a technology approach that had everything going for it all at once: the right name, the right technology, and the right timing.

The right timing part is easy to see: what better time, in the past 37 years, for an Internet-based technology capable of driving down CapEx, than in the immediate aftermath of the greatest economic downturn since the Great Depression? What better time for an approach requiring storage at commodity rates, what better time for an approach requiring widespread broadband connections, what better time for a technology approach that disrupts the enterprise IT 'priesthood' and puts IT squarely back in the possession of the business? It is truly the Perfect Storm.

Cloud Computing is demonstrably the right technology because everyone who has pioneered it has become astonishingly successful:

Think Salesforce.com, which since 1999 has attracted 55,400 customers and over 1,500,000 subscribers, acting as the pathfinder for the business success of highly scalable applications delivered over the Internet.

Think Amazon, which in 2006 kick-started the popularization of the whole idea when it introduced first its Simple Storage Service (S3), offering storage for the Internet, and then its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) - a companion product to S3 designed to provide "resizable compute capacity in the cloud."

Think Google, which introduced Google Apps For Your Domain - also in '06 - and which hasn't stopped innovating in the cloud since.

As for the right name, what more need be said than that Cloud Computing has caught on in a way that "Grid Computing" or "Utility Computing" or "Elastic Computing" never did?

As a metaphor is sums up perfectly the spirit of compute capacity that can be set up and torn down programatically, leaving someone else to take care of the networking and hardware.

However there's no doubt that "Cloud fatigue" is in danger of setting in as almost every existing suite of software becomes not re-engineered but merely re-branded, and give the magic C-word. Which is why my own preference is now to move to a slightly more nuanced metaphor, that of the "Resource Cloud."

Pioneered by Abiquo, whose CEO Pete Malcolm is an undisputed technology thought leader, the concept of Resource Cloud nicely encapsulates the complete separation of the physical infrastructure that provides the computing resources from the enterprises which consume them in the form of compute power, storage, or whatever other service they might choose.

This notion of a "Resource Cloud" in which providers of resources and consumers who use compute power are matched up is very powerful precisely because it is very simple. And because it injects a crucial missing ingredient into the "Cloud" metaphor: meaning.

Not everyone will immediately grasp that the providers and the enterprises who are being matched up in the Resource Cloud will need some kind of policy-driven workload management to interconnect the two; but that doesn't matter, because for me what the term "Resource Cloud" does is to immediately explain itself in a way that "The Cloud" or "Cloud Computing" doesn't.

It's time we all understood about the Resource Cloud. In my opinion, 2010 is the year in which we will.

Thursday, March 25, 2010

Someone once asked Ernest Hemingway if it was difficult to write. He replied "Not at all, you just sit at the typewriter and bleed!"

Hemingway must be turning these days in his grave, because if Cloud Computing has done anything it has shown once and for all that technology commentators, far from wrestling - as Hemingway did daily - with writer's block, are suffering from just the opposite: too much is being written, and too often, by too many for anyone to be able to make use of it. The world has gotten Cloudomania!

Lest you think I am exaggerating, consider the following: back in 2006 a search on "Cloud Computing" would have yielded, in Google, not a whole lot. Back then the talk of the technology world was Virtualization, not Cloud. But just look what has happened since then: